I first spotted Julian Barnes at a distance, looking at a couple 30 feet high wrapped in an embrace. We both arrived approximately 10 minutes earlier for our meeting at St Pancras station in the center of London. He did not seem impressed, crisscrosing his long nose when he turned his head all along the return to have an appropriate overview of the statue, entitled, in an appropriate manner, “the meeting place”, which is looming on the Eurostar platforms.
“You feel bad to look for his skirt,” he said, posing a copy of the New Yorker and the Guardian with a cryptic crossword half full on our table on a sort of terrace belonging to the Carluccio branch of the station, next to the trains. It was 11:30 am, no breakfast or lunch, and we were neither correctly inside nor outside, sitting there in an urban hinterland between England and continental Europe. We ordered a cappuccino and a pastry each, to adapt this clumsy intermediate time, chocolate pain for him and an ordinary crescent for me. “Do you want jam with it?” He, not the server, asked me as I ordered. I did it. “Don't ask for jam, you don't understand,” he said.
St Pancras was his choice of location. I asked him why we were here. He made a smile hitting his whole face. “You tell me, you invited me. When I said that I wanted to say the station, rather than the interview, he laughed a long time and strongly to his mistake. “I thought it could be a metaphysical question, or very, very local.” He loves her here, to put it simply. “I always delight me. Same thing with airports, I appreciate them, that I go somewhere, whether I come back or that I am right there, to meet someone from an airplane. I love it. I love simple things, like entering the short -term parking lot. ” He laughs again, as he often does.
It is also in this particular location in London, we are only two hours from France. Barnes has written a lot about his long love story with our closest neighbors, first lit by having two French teachers for parents, then studying him at university and visiting the country throughout his life. He has been traveling on Eurostar since its opening in 1994. “It's a little less glamorous,” he admits. “I was a smoker at that time, and one of my favorite moments would be to come back from Paris, to get on the train. They would give you dinner, then you went to the smoking car, and you took your coffee while the train entered the tunnel, and you were under the chain, taking your coffee and smoking a cigarette. Simple but exciting. ” He no longer smokes, after a recent pneumonia fight has reproduced him permanently. “I guess it's a good result, but I have probably made damage over the past 50 years.”
Barnes, now 79 years old, appreciated A sparkling career This shows no signs of slowdown. He is the author of two Memoirs, a non-fiction book, several collections of tests and new and 14 novels (or 18 years old, including his police fiction under the name of Plume Dan Kavanagh), one, one, The feeling of an endwon the Booker Prize in 2011, and three others were nominated, including Flaubert's parrot In 1984. His latest work, a collection of essays on the revision of his opinions on subjects such as books, politics and memory called Change my mindwas recently published by Notting Hill Editions. He is one of our great public intellectuals, really worthy of the name, but he wears it quite slightly. Or rather, he seems as interested in the great philosophical concerns of life as in the banal.
The St Pancras station offers a particularly good observation, and Barnes took advantage of it while we were talking. He has a lively eye for what he refers in the new test of tests like “the details of life every day”. While we discussed the disappointments of didactic art, his attention was drawn to a man and a woman who looked at the statue. “Oh, he appreciates it. She is not. He is the optimist. And he carries the two bags,” he said, a silent look on his face to be able to observe these people in an unattended moment. “Yes, we have just spotted a marriage.”
I asked him if people have never started to change their mind. He thought for a few moments, his fingers were walking over his coffee. “Well, sometimes people want to have their mind filled with someone else. I think they are somehow half trained, then they meet someone who seems to better understand the world, and they take this understanding of the world. I think that may not be exactly about his mind,” he said. For him, as he writes Change my mindCertain subjects on which he has changed his opinions over the years are the books of Em Forster and linguistic prescriptivism. “But there are a lot of things on which I have not changed my mind,” he told me. In the book, he lists some of them such as the primacy of love, the primacy of art, and that there is great joy, “more a certain moral value”, to be found in sport.
Beyond the details of what we do and does not change the mind, during a lifetime, the notion of change of mind is deeper, for Barnes. He poses the question: what part of someone's essential personality is made up of his opinions? “Given what we know of the brain, since we know that there are no” self-like “, should we say that my mind changed me as much as I changed my mind?” He asked. These are impossible questions, but he appreciates them anyway. “It is difficult to think of the brain, because we can only think of the brain using the brain. So we can never draw correct conclusions, unless AI can look at our brain in a different way.”
If a person's self is not made up of his opinions, one could say that he was made up of her memories. But memory, as Barnes said in our conversation and explores in several of his works, is “misleading”. “We adjust it without notice. I think it is an advantage for a writer, because people tell their life stories differently, there are ambiguities. ” His own memories, in an unhappy form, do not strike him, however, as a subject of literary work. Barnes is not one for self -fiction, as a writer or as a reader. He thought The years By Annie Ernaux was “great, but I think in a way:” Do I want to read more Annie Ernaux? ” I understand the image ”.
Barnes is still clearly in love with his own first memories of the trip to France, however, in particular his first trip abroad, aged 11 or 12, in Morris Minor of his family on the channel on ferry. “When I went for the first time to France,” he started knowingly nostalgic, “we went to Newhaven, and they driven the car in a small sort of wooden plateau, and they hoisted it in the ship.” Barnes raised a hand, moved him a few centimeters on the side, then left him again, “and they put it”. He has not changed his mind on the country. He loved it, and he still loves her. It is “an irreducible feeling”.
“My point of view on things, and probably my point of view on Great Britain – if I had a second different country, it could have been different. If my parents had been Italian teachers, I would have had a completely different experience. I would have written La Gerbil de Dante. It's not very nice, ”he said suddenly, looking at his plate. Indeed, they were not good pastries, brilliant and tired. When we separated, it was still half a plate. A man does not spend as much from his life to think of France as Barnes had to eat pain less than the chocolate.
“Changing My Mind” by Julian Barnes is published by Notting Hill Editions
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